Owing to their vast antiquity, the style of architecture is somewhat odd — but is not for that reason the less strikingly picturesque. They are fashioned of hard-burned little bricks, red, with black ends, so that the walls look like chess-boards upon a great scale. The gables are turned to the front, and there are cornices as big as all the rest of the house over the eaves, and over the main doors. The windows are narrow and deep, with very tiny panes and a great deal of sash. On the roof is a vast quantity of tiles with long curly ears. The wood-work, throughout, is of dingy oak, and there is much carving about it, with but a trifling variety of pattern; for time out of mind, the carvers of Vondervotteimittiss have never been able to carve more than two objects — a time-piece and a cabbage. But these they do excellently well, and intersperse them with singular ingenuity wherever they find room for the chisel.
The Tale
An unnamed narrator describes “the Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss.” If you relax your ears enough, the town’s name sounds like “Wonder-what-time-it-is.” Which is apropos, because the town’s inhabitants famously fixate only on clocks and, even more outre, cabbages. Indeed, in all of the town’s near-identical homes, the mantelpieces all have engravings of clocks and cabbages, and upon each mantelpiece sits a clock and a potted cabbage plant. To top it off, the town’s council adopted a resolution that “We will stick by our clocks and our cabbages.”
The plot, such as it is, centers on the town’s enormous, seven-faced clock, which is the village’s “pride and wonder” that sits atop a steeple. One day a sinister-looking stranger gets to the top of the tower, assaults the clock-keeper, and causes the clock to strike thirteen, which in turn throws the time-fixated and routinized townspeople into rudderless confusion. The narrator concludes with this: “Let us proceed in a body to the borough, and restore the ancient order of things in Vondervotteimittiss by ejecting that little chap from the steeple.” If only all of life’s problems could be solved so easily!
The full story is available here.
The Drink
Obviously the only kind of cocktail to evoke this story must somehow incorporate clocks and cabbages. The first of these is easy enough, if you’ll allow me to use “thyme” as a stand-in for a clock. Get it?
The cabbage part is simultaneously simple and fraught. I opted for a purple cabbage, which will impart a lovely hue but also a disgusting, flatulent taste and smell. I’m told that one can somewhat mitigate the taste and smell by using dehydrated cabbage. But really, where am I going to find that? No, this is one of those cases where I’m just going to have to (literally) hold my nose and soldier through.
I chopped up some cabbage and thyme, and steeped them in vodka for an hour. The longer it steeps, the more intense the color…and the more disgusting the taste. So you’ll have to use your own judgment here. I then added some triple sec to try to mask the cabbage a bit, but this strategy invokes the proverbial lipstick-on-a-pig epithet. Finally, as the cabbage is readily evident in the color of the drink, I added a spring of thyme to drive home the timepiece reference. The result was visually satisfactory, though, alas, the same cannot be said for its gustatory qualities.
Ingredients:
2 oz. vodka
⅛ cup of chopped red or purple cabbage
1 oz. triple sec
⅛ cup of chopped thyme, plus a sprig of thyme as garnish
Add the vodka, cabbage, and chopped thyme to a cocktail shaker. Shake it up, then let it steep for 10 minutes to an hour, depending on where you draw the line between attractive color and disgusting taste. Strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Add triple sec, stir, and add a sprig of thyme as a garnish.
I’m not going to lie: This is quite possibly the most revolting cocktail I’ve ever experienced. I would encourage you to pour it down the sink. Unless you have old, unreliable plumbing, in which case I would pour it down the sewer grate in the gutter in front of your house. Make sure the local environmental-quality authorities are not watching.
Poe-Script
As hard as it might be to believe, this story with its exceedingly-thin plot was the subject of an unfinished comic opera by none other than Claude Debussy. Le Diable dans le beffroi was meant to be rather faithful to Poe’s story, and the voiceless Devil’s solo part was to be whistled and played on the violin.
Chasing Phantoms 
But the color is fabulous! Nice touch with the drain grate!
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Yes, I thought the color was almost worth the horrible taste. But not quite. The drain grate kind of says it all.
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